In the readings for this week, I was struck by a few things:
1.We have a choice between viewing literacy as a skill or as an experience, and our thoughts on this matter will have a marked impact on the way that librarians/ media specialists are viewed going forward in the information age. Pappas noted that schools are hiring reading coaches to develop students' decoding and comprehension skills and instituting classroom libraries in order for students to be in closer proximity to print materials. Libraries, and the librarians that manage them, operate from a very different perspective. We create quality experiences with media and serve as training grounds for independent, lifelong learning. From our perspective, literacy is much more than a skill that requires drilling; it is a habit of mind and a mode of experiencing the world that leads to meaningful participation in society. What needs to happen in order for the educational paradigm to shift towards a more holistic and contextual perspective?
2. In order to demonstrate the worth of our profession, we have had to justify ourselves within the current standards-based vernacular. However, we are creating standards (and thereby assessments) for inherently subjective processes such as interpretation, understanding, ethical values, responsibility, and one's ability to assess themselves. I agree that these are attitudes and values that we must cultivate with regards to 21st century literacies, but how viable/measurable are these standards?
3. Ethics seemed to play a large role in the AASL Standards, but I think there needs to be a sincere and thoughtful reevaluation of our informational ethics. We are in the process of creating completely new ways of relating to one another and to our digital objects, and I think that will create new codes of conduct and ideas about we should behave, especially with regards to property, ownership, censorship, and social responsibility.
4. When discussing issues of access, the AASL Standards are remarkably straight-forward: “All children deserve equitable access to books and reading, to information, and to information technology in an environment that is safe and conducive to learning.” This struck me for a number of reasons. First of all, access is a much more subjective issue than just providing resources. Mark Warschauer, in discussing issues regarding the digital divide, provides a poignant insight when he writes, “access to online information has very little to do with the Internet per se, but has everything to do with political, economic, institutional, cultural, and linguistic contexts which shape the meaning of the Internet in people’s lives.” Access has less to do with availability and more to do with students' attitudes and experiences with what is available. Additionally, accessibility also alludes to the quality of information/materials provided, and regrettably there is no way to ensure equitable access in that regard.
As librarians and educators, we do what we do to promote social inclusion and provide meaningful opportunities for lifelong personal growth, not to make sure that taxpayers get their money's worth from our nation's students. This week's reading came as a sobering realization that the future of my profession hinges on our ability to prove this to a world bent on figures and efficiency, but I suppose that's a fight we will just have to keep up.
You hone in on the issue of access and how consciously the authors of the Standards articulated that it was much more than the number of computers found in a library or classroom. There are so many other layers. Even the fact that most folks in underprivileged communities have a mobile phone is not an indicator that access is present. Many times, knowledge of where to look may be missing, or sites do not render with full functionality on handheld devices. There is much for us to think about regarding information literacy "in the wild." An Achilles heel of many librarians is that we think only about learning in school contexts and we don't think enough about access issues in the real world outside of school.
ReplyDeleteI like the second point you make--I've been feeling the same way. We're supposed to teach to the standards, but really, our teaching is more generalizable. Unfortunately, it's also harder to assess--which means it's also harder to justify our job. Which seems counterintuitive, since this is real learning. Hmm.
ReplyDeleteI like your third point about ethics in regards to new methods of communication. As teachers we will have to keep ourselves always updated on the newest communication tools and (hopefully) be familiar with them and understand how they will change existing standards and ethics of communication forums before our students start to use them (or even abuse them).
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